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Far-right populists typically generate attention and support by attacking minorities. It worked for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front in the 1970s and Donald Trump in 2015, and everyone in between.
The two-part formula is, first, to attack the establishment and, second, to identify an out-group to scapegoat.
Le Pen started with Arabs, Trump with Mexicans. And, in between the two, chronologically, came Pauline Hanson in 1996. She started with Asians and Indigenous Australians.
Over time, when they needed to generate new energy, these provocateurs targeted additional minority groups to keep the hate fresh. Le Pen went after Jews, Trump after Muslims. Hanson attacked Muslims too.
It works as a source of power for the far right. Because the left typically campaigns in favour of minorities. But when it oversteps the mark of common sense and reasonableness, the right – or far right – steps in to mobilise the majority. The majority prevails. It’s pretty simple. The right advances, the left is forced to retreat.
This is the standard playbook. This week, in her first appearance at the National Press Club, Hanson tossed the playbook into the bin. Yes, she pursued her prejudices against various minorities: transgender, Muslim and Indigenous people, for instance.
But the big breach with the far-right formula is that she went after majorities too. Workers, for starters. She’s long campaigned to make it easier for bosses to sack staff. But this week she switched from targeting the system to attacking workers themselves.
“Industrial relations, I can assure you, needs a complete overhaul because it’s not working,” she said. “Businesses also tell me you can’t sack people these days. They’re on their phones, they don’t work, they don’t turn up, they actually are lazy, and businesses are tied to it, they’ve had enough.”
Lazy. Undeserving. Sack them. And this from the woman who portrays herself as the battler’s best friend.
Australia has about 18 million enrolled voters. How many of these are employed? Fourteen million. That’s three-quarters, an overwhelming majority. And she smeared them all.
Labor likes to point out that Hanson has always opposed benefits for workers – she’s critical of increases in the minimum wage, laws against wage theft, protections for gig economy workers, the policy of same job, same pay. But now she’s armed Labor and the ACTU with a valuable video clip of herself calling Aussie workers lazy and calling for more of them to be sacked.
Neither Le Pen nor Trump criticised workers. Because they’re the majority everywhere. It’s not in the playbook to alienate them. Sure, Le Pen and Trump have denounced unions and strikers and the unemployed. But they stopped short of attacking workers themselves.
Trump even makes a point of masquerading as the worker’s friend, the battler’s best bud. It’s phony, but many American voters fell for it, possibly until this month when he declared that “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” and “I love the inflation”.
In truth, he’s given tax cuts to billionaires while cancelling food stamps for the poorest. If you look at the division of the spoils in the US today, the truth is that Trump’s America is the most anti-worker in three-quarters of a century.
As The Wall Street Journal reported last month, “Labour’s share of gross domestic income [conceptually similar to GDP] sank to 51 per cent, the lowest since records began in 1947. Profits’ share climbed to 12.1 per cent, the highest since 1950. That, in a nutshell, explains the chasm between an ebullient stock market and anxious public.”
But why come right out and denounce workers? It’s a tremendous risk to Hanson’s image as the champion of the battler. In a time of politics as usual, that alone would sink her.
But wait, there’s more. Women. Childcare and abortion are issues for the entire society but resonate most powerfully with female voters, a narrow majority of the electorate. Hanson sounded distinctly hostile to childcare subsidies and wage rises for childcare workers. And she sounded a revisionist note on abortion access.
On the childcare system: “It needs a full investigation into it. Where is the money going? Who’s utilising those services? Do they require those services? Because it’s costing the taxpayer, like I said, $16 billion.”
And Chloe Bouras of Network Ten asked Hanson whether she considered a recent wage increase for childcare workers to be unnecessary.
Hanson: “I can’t say whether – they just – didn’t get a pay rise just not so long ago? Like I said, pay rise, who pays for it?”
On abortion, Anna Henderson of SBS asked the One Nation leader: “What [do] you think should be the gestational limit for abortion?” Hanson replied: “It’s a discussion that needs to be had with the Australian people.”
She wouldn’t venture an exact time limit beyond saying that 20 weeks was too late. But it’s clear that she intends to reopen this long-settled matter. Two of her parliamentary colleagues in recent weeks have signalled an intent to campaign on abortion.
Barnaby Joyce addressed an anti-abortion rally in Sydney’s Martin Place two weeks ago. He called for a crackdown on abortions performed for the purpose of selecting the sex of a baby. “Politically, does this make you popular? Nup,” Joyce said. “But you know why you do it? Because it’s the right thing to do.”
This is a coded criticism of the immigrant communities, where sex selection by abortion is sometimes practised. It’s a practice already banned in NSW, but that doesn’t stop politicians from posturing.
More drastically, Hanson’s fellow senator, Malcolm Roberts, was asked last weekend why One Nation wasn’t “aiming to get rid of it [abortion] altogether”. He responded: “That’s becoming my goal.”
Hanson repeatedly says that she hasn’t changed, but that Australia has caught up with her. And it’s true that she’s been a strident opponent of immigration throughout.
But childcare and abortion? “It was surprising to me that she took a kick at childcare and early childhood education workers,” said a specialist One Nation researcher, Jordan McSwiney, of the University of Canberra. “That exposes her quite a lot. I think the government will take that and run with it.”
And her position on abortion? “That’s a newish thing, from about 2020, when the pro-life position first popped up on the One Nation website. It wasn’t a policy for them in the 2019 election. And, in the 1990s, Hanson was talking about a woman’s right to choose.”
On these issues of childcare and abortion, Hanson is closer to the positions of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Trump. Both men opposed nationally subsidised childcare and both were on the anti-abortion end of their relative nations’ spectra.
Le Pen, who died last year, was staunchly anti-abortion throughout, while Trump has moved against abortion selectively over time, according to the political winds of the day.
In these areas, Hanson “is digging into stuff for the far right”, McSwiney says. “This hasn’t been on her radar to now. It’s pure red meat to her supporters.” Hanson is playing into what McSwiney calls “a very particular reactionary movement”.
However, Le Pen’s daughter, Marine, who expelled her father to take over his party, now called National Rally, has modernised policy. Marine is strongly in favour of subsidised childcare and free access to abortion.
The question is whether Hanson has gone too far for her own political good. Her comments on these topics were unscripted answers to reporters’ questions. They expose a distaste for workers and for the existing rights of women.
In the short term, most Australians will be unaware of these particulars from her press club performance. One Nation’s sliced-up clips of her angriest moments are getting attention and will continue to fuel her short-term momentum.
But “there’s stuff in there that might surprise some of her new supporters, especially her position on abortion”, says McSwiney.
With two years to the next election, Hanson’s opponents have plenty of time to campaign and mobilise workers and women against her. But will it work? These are not conventional times.
In conventional times, it’d be politically fatal for a politician to be handed a free plane by a billionaire. But, just as Trump gets away with taking a 747 from the emir of Qatar, Hanson has gotten away with it.
How? Her supporters, says RedBridge political analyst Tony Barry, see it this way: “‘An outsider like us is getting insider treatment – good on her.’ One Nation voter responses can be counterintuitive and unorthodox.”
Voters despairing of improvement in their lives “see her as their wrecking ball and their truth-teller. They are sick of institutions, they think the two-party system has failed them. That’s why they’re attracted to an anti-establishment party.”
But, for the first time, she’s recklessly pitted herself against the majority. The headline in The Daily Telegraph caught the tenor: “No one escapes Hanson wrath”.
Has she jumped the political shark? Tony Barry asks: “Can she and her party withstand the searching scrutiny for another two years? I’m not convinced.”
Hanson so far has proved impervious to attacks by her enemies. But recent history shows that political parties’ greatest damage is not imposed by their enemies. It’s self-inflicted.
Peter Hartcher is political and international editor. He writes a world column each Tuesday.
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Peter Hartcher is political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.From our partners
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